Parents talk of taking issue of school uniforms in Saugus to state level

SAUGUS – Parent Melissa Breda asked the School Department to consider instituting school uniforms because she feels it would essentially make life much easier for students.”It would eliminate the status quo,” she said. “I believe it would help families with the cost of putting kids through school just with attire.”According to Breda roughly 3.8 percent of Saugus families live at or below the poverty level. She believes that requiring a uniform would help ease the financial burden of fashion.”It’s very sad to see a child laughed at because they’re not wearing the right clothes or shoes,” she said.Breda admitted that has never happened to her children.”We’ve been very fortunate,” she said. “But I’ve seen children treated badly because they weren’t wearing the right clothes,”Breda and her husband, Eric, have four children, three in Saugus schools and one, who just started seventh grade at the Pioneer Charter School, who must wear a school uniform.”It cost me $140 for a year’s worth of clothing,” she said.Breda said she would like to see students required to wear something simple like khakis or chinos, a polo shirt and a cardigan. The schools could also have dress-down days and offer dress-down points, where students could earn the right to skip wearing a uniform on special days such as their birthdays.She said she even found a company that would develop an online shop to make things easy for parents and offered to give back a certain percentage of sales.The subject is not an unfamiliar one in Saugus. School Committee Chairman Wendy Reed said it has come up in the past and actions have been taken to tighten the school dress code.”But we found in public schools you really can’t mandate uniforms,” she said.Reed said they ran a pilot program in two schools where they offered shirts with the school’s name embroidered on them in the hopes students would adopt their own dress code.”It didn’t take off,” she said.Committee member Arthur Grabowski said he agreed with Breda and even asked the director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees what could be done.”The issue of dress codes is a dicey one,” he said. “Legally you can’t mandate them.”Grabowski said there are stipulations, if clothing is disruptive to the school environment or harmful to the student who is wearing it, it can be banned but they can’t spell out a policy that for example, bars girls from wearing flip-flops.”I believe teachers should have dress codes,” he added. “You can’t tell a teacher they can’t wear jeans in a classroom because it’s not a safety issue.”Eric Breda wondered how Revere managed a dress code when other public schools failed to make it work. According to the Revere High School handbook, Revere doesn’t have a school uniform policy, what it has is a very strict dress code, which it adheres to. Grabowski also noted that charter schools are allowed to enforce dress codes because students choose to go there.Eric Breda asked the committee if it would consider reforming a subcommittee to look into the issue and Reed said she would see if there was any interest in the matter.Committee member Rick Doucette suggested Breda might want to attack the issue on the state level.”That was my idea too, going to the state,” she said. “I think it should be statewide. I know it won’t take all the problems away but it will help.”